Not One Miracle

I was just beginning my second year in college when a friend asked me to organize a sequence of health nuggets for an evangelistic series.

At the time, I was confused.

Why me?

I had only recently given soymilk a second chance after my childhood days of tan-hued shelf-stable soymilk, and my willpower for outdoor exercise was apt to lessen each year with the seasonal drop in temperatures. I had even gained my “freshman fifteen” (the proverbial 15lbs or 7kg students gain in their first year of college) along with everyone else.

I remember thinking, Is he asking me because I eat big salads?

But the change my friend was affirming ran much deeper than my new love for tofu or the early-morning gym sessions. I had stopped letting my health happen to me and had decided to set in place habits that would shape the rest of my life.

Cracks in the Armor

Fifteen years later I was going strong. Married, a mother to a toddler, and pregnant with our second child, I had just stepped away from a dozen years of teaching and had chosen to both stay at home with our littles and become part of the health ministries team for my local church. In addition to leading out in a monthly plant-based cooking class, I was walking every day in rain or shine or wind or snow or dark, sweating through pregnancy workouts in my living room, and guzzling green smoothies for breakfast. I had an app on my phone to track my nutrient intake; I was drinking nearly a gallon of water most days; and if I happened to get sick, there was always hydrotherapy, or a handful of charcoal tablets, or an immunity-boosting concoction I could try. I had even embarked on a rest reform, thanks to the conviction I had found in Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep.

Armed with an arsenal of natural remedies and guarded by a host of lifestyle practices, I was confident in my ability to handle my own health challenges.

And then I started to lose my hearing and balance.

At first I assumed that the dizziness and tinnitus were because of the pregnancy, and I mentioned my complaint briefly at my 16-week prenatal visit. My obstetrician was unconcerned and suggested merely that I begin taking an allergy medication.

When the left side of my face fell with what appeared to be a sudden onset of Bell’s palsy a few weeks later, however, I could feel my self-assurance faltering. For perhaps the first time in my life I began to doubt whether alternating an ice pack and a hot water bottle against my afflicted cheek would do any good.

My doctors were just as puzzled as I was when I returned home early from a vacation with a rapidly deteriorating body. According to their records, I had never had allergies. I hadn’t taken any sort of prescription medicine since a bout of bronchitis nearly a decade before. My blood pressure was normal. My weight was appropriate. My baby’s heart was ticking along predictably. My diet was exceptional. My activity level was above average. In fact, my 34-year-old health status was such that my physician dismissed me with the advice that I pick up a powerful inflammation-fighting steroid on the way home and try to relax.

When I sought out a second opinion the next day, however, my new physician was the one to address the full extent of my difficulties. I was practically deaf in my left ear, the entire left side of my face was paralyzed and partially numb, and I couldn’t pass the most basic of balance tests. Something had damaged three of my cranial nerves—and I needed an urgent MRI of my brain.

No Ram in the Thicket

The revelation that I had a tumor in my skull base came as a shock. At the same time, it represented both a validation of my concerns and an explanation for my month of losses.

But why me?

If it was difficult to break the news of my illness to myself, my family, and my closest friends, it was nearly unbearable for me to explain to the members of my cooking class why someone else would be leading out for the foreseeable future. Actually, I was downright embarrassed. What was this? The episode in which the healthy girl got brain cancer? Why hadn’t my beliefs and practices protected me?

God hadn’t needed to deliver me from my pain, because He had walked alongside me through it.

Throughout the initial months of my diagnosis with primary CNS lymphoma, I did everything I could. In the aftermath of a craniotomy, I underwent a week of rehab to learn how to walk again. Between the five treatments of proton-beam radiation I received to “buy time” for the development of our baby, I continued to work on my physical therapy exercises. Upon returning home, I downed a potent two-quart mixture of cancer-fighting vegetable and fruit juices each day until my glucose levels became too elevated to continue—and I had grown a second tumor in less than a month anyway. In the week that elapsed between the urgent delivery of our healthy newborn at 35 weeks and the scheduled beginning of my chemotherapy regimen, I chased after alternative-care programs until, one by one, each denied my case as too risky.

It didn’t make sense. I had given God every opportunity to orchestrate something big. I had claimed His promises and waited eagerly and trustingly to see what He would do. I had prayed for every interaction with my surgeons, nurses, therapists, technicians, and oncologists, and I had watched Him arrange potentially life-changing conversations with many of them. Hadn’t I passed the test yet? Could I be healed now? Could I be released to go on with my life?

But although God continued to guide me to more and more scriptural assurances of deliverance and restoration, there was no ram in my thicket. There was just more suffering.

Not From, But Through

Twenty-four days after I entered the hospital for an autologous stem cell transplant, I returned home to my children and husband as a shrunken, bald, weakened-but-cancer-free version of myself. My cheeks were gaunt and blotchy. My hands and chest were dotted with an engraftment rash and peeling. My jeans sagged dangerously if I put my cell phone in my back pocket.

But I was alive. And to my care team’s amazement, I wasn’t even in a wheelchair.

Why me?

I had heard plenty of the other kind of stories within the posts of my online support community. I knew what could have happened.

Instead, I was still here. And there was the undeniable evidence that God had preserved me and sustained me during my dark nights and desolate days. I hadn’t contracted any infections or fevers while immunocompromised. There had been no allergic reactions. No feeding tubes. No severe illnesses. No relapses.

No, there hadn’t been one miracle—there had been a continuous string of them.

God hadn’t needed to deliver me from my pain, because He had walked alongside me through it. He had given me words of hope to share in the hallways. He had taught me empathy for others facing trauma. He had entreated me to trust Him despite my circumstances, to cling to Him when there seemed to be nothing else, so that I would retain my hold on Him more tightly when I was restored. And He had inspired me to tell others of what He had done.

Maybe living according to the laws of health did prevent me from experiencing worse—and that’s why I’m going to continue to follow them. Maybe I have survived in part because of my vitality beforehand—and so I’m endeavoring to rebuild that strength. But maybe that’s missing the point entirely.

Perhaps the purpose of my story is less about me and less about deciphering the reason for my part in it, and much, much more about bearing witness to the divine love that has enveloped me, upheld me, and saved me.